


Not Taking Prisoners

by Jacynon



Category: RWBY
Genre: Eating Disorders, Gen, Other, Pre-Canon, References to Depression, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-25 19:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14983751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacynon/pseuds/Jacynon
Summary: Ruby decided at a very, very young age that she needed something in her life that she could control.





	Not Taking Prisoners

**Author's Note:**

> AKA based on a headcanon/concept where Ruby suffered from an eating disorder in the immediate few months after her mother died. Mostly this is just a vent fic
> 
> I don't feel like I expanded on this as much as I could've but it's kind of something I wanted to get out as quickly as I could, so I hope it's decent on its own

Ruby decided at a very, very young age that she needed something in her life that she could control.

It was sometime after her mother died that she started to feel as though she couldn't do much of anything in her life. Someone important to her was taken away and there was nothing she could do about it - before, during, or after. It seemed like she was crying herself to sleep every night in the few empty weeks after her mother's apparent passing and, outside of feeling like her life no longer had direction, she couldn't remember much of anything else about that period of time.

Taiyang tried to be there for them, but it was just as hard on him. They could feel his pain as he tried to soothe theirs.

Their family life became dark and monotonous even as they joked around more than ever before. Yang took from their father how to mask pain with humour. Ruby hated that she could never quite figure it out.

To add to all that, though, she felt as if she didn't experience grief the same way as they did. She didn't have their mood swings and emotional highs and lows. At every moment of every day, she ran on nothing, feeling drained and blank. She coped with overwhelming numbness and suppression. Meanwhile, Yang would go through what were decidedly really good days and really, _really_ bad days. Her anger grew and grew and if she didn't have training and her time at Signal as an outlet, she might've been somehow even worse.

"She left us," she'd said one day at night while venting to Ruby. "She didn't _need_ to leave us."

Ruby could only vaguely empathize with her sister's anger.

It wouldn't be right to say that Ruby felt angry. There was certainly resentment there, of course, but it was often overshadowed by her confusion. She longed to understand why their mother left on a mission dangerous enough to be a lethal risk. She wanted to know the truth and the idea that she couldn't sent a twisted pain in her chest.

There was no one to ask. Ruby was powerless.

* * *

It began all at once, not gradually.

Like a switch going off in her head, she made the decision. But it didn't _feel_ like a decision - not really. She looked in the mirror and didn't see herself. She just saw a body that she happened to pilot. There was no real insecurity. At least, none that she could have identified consciously. Maybe she hated the way she looked on a deep level that even she still doesn't know about, but that for some reason didn't feel right in the moment and doesn't feel right now.

Ruby looks like her mother.

Maybe that made her want to warp her image beyond that recognizable state, but she already knows the real reason behind it.

It was never necessarily about weight. It wasn't quite about being thinner for her, or even just looking different in general. It was about having something - _anything_ \- in her life to control.

Every meal she had, she'd written down. She took one of the journals her father had gotten her for her upcoming first year at Signal and used it to catalogue everything she ate. For the first few days, she didn't change her eating habits at all, only deciding to keep track of them. But looking at the list grow longer made her feel terrible. Reaching half the page made her feel like a failure, like she was wasting food, and like she was out of control of her body.

It was almost subconscious how the list would gradually shorten. Every time she'd see one item fewer than the previous day, she was happy. She was content.

About a week in, she started to add the number of calories, not content _enough_ in the work she was doing. She needed to eat less right down to the decimal point, because that would be the only way she could feel anything anymore.

The numbers started to pile and weigh on her. In a way, the guilt felt good.

It all began around a month before she'd started her first year at Signal and continued into the school semester.

* * *

No one really noticed what she was going through and it made her feel strange.

She wasn't sure whether the passive unaware glances made her happy or made her want to cry out. On one hand, she knew that anyone who noticed would immediately try to get her help, and she couldn't let that happen. They'd tell her that what she's doing is _wrong_ , that starving herself isn't the answer, and all of the things she's heard before told to those in her place. But, on the other hand, the fact that she didn't need to try very hard to hide the fact that she was effectively starving herself made her feel more alone than ever.

It made her feel like no one cared while at the same time knowing that people would have cared _too much_ and tried to stop her if they found out. She knew logically that couldn't have made any sense, but her brain was already too far gone to worry about that.

Taiyang was going through enough on his own and, if he knew, she'd just have been putting more on his shoulders. The same went for Yang - the blonde was taking it upon herself to be strong for Ruby's sake, after all. Ruby's teachers at Signal didn't pay much attention to her in general. She was quiet in classes and didn't try to make any friends. On top of that, her studies were sub-par - not bad, but not great. She did fine on homework, but not the greatest on tests, leaving her to be a pretty middle-of-the-road student. So, the professors tended not to think much of her.

Of course, there was one exception to that.

Her uncle frequently singled her out in class.

Qrow would call on her more often than not, mostly likely to mess with her. He made jokes regarding her and the rest of their family and the fact that they were related was no secret to the school body. It made Ruby's goal of avoiding scrutiny as well as she could a lot harder to achieve.

She felt as though he knew her better than anyone else. He was heavily affected by Summer's death, she's sure. He'd become even more emotionally distant than before and she takes notice of every passing day that she has a substitute for his class. He came in visibly hungover or even, sometimes, still drunk. It's something she got used to. It was probably why he hadn't paid much attention to the issues she dealt with every passing day.

Her vision started to blur one night and she had to succumb to sleep through her rampant insomnia. She cried until she couldn't anymore, until she lost her ability to function.

At first, she cried because she was lonely. Later, she cried because she felt awful for feeling lonely.

After all, she chose this loneliness for herself.

* * *

Eventually, she stopped feeling hungry.

It wasn't a quick shift her body made. She felt the pangs and chugged water, chewed on each and every one of her pencils until a couple were unusable, did what she could to hold it off as long as possible until it hurt to shove down the bare minimum of what she needed to keep herself alive. Even the smell of food started to make her stomach turn after a couple of months. It was as if she was conditioning her body to hate food, to get rid of any appetite like it would make her no longer hungry.

She was still hungry in the way that her body got weaker and weaker. In-school training became more than a chore. It was something she had to trudge her way through. Either that, or fake it.

Trying her best, like she'd sometimes wanted to, was out of the question.

The thought that she might actually die was always at the back of her mind.

Ruby knew she could've died from this if she wasn't careful. That was why she, instead of keeping herself starving for her entire life, started to eat when she absolutely needed to and forcing herself to get rid of it whenever she'd been given the opportunity. She would run to the nearest bathroom and kneel down to expel everything she could. It hurt. It made her wonder if there was a time in her life in which she didn't experience constant pain.

There was nothing inside of her. It wasn't just the malnourishment telling her that.

* * *

Yang's love for food never bothered Ruby up until she'd started all of this.

It used to be just an odd quirk of her sister's. But then, it started to feel constant, even if it wasn't. It was all she heard coming out of Yang's mouth.

Every other day, she had to look at the food their father made and listen to her sister rave about it when she observed through the bars of the cage she'd put around herself. It was like watching from the outside in to a family's dinner table. She watched her sister eat and forced down the food - some sort of pasta, she wasn't really conscious enough to make a mental note of it - while fully knowing that she had to get rid of it.

Then, gradually, Yang started to distance herself.

She'd spent more time with her friends, who she'd never before cared all too much about, and less with Ruby. Over time, she started to form meaningless relationships and took off without warning a lot more than normal.

Ruby started to miss the comments about food, oddly enough.

It was afterward that the list she wrote shortened significantly day by day. Ruby ate less, felt less, and the aching cold was all that distracted her from her loneliness.

* * *

The first and last person who found out was Qrow, and he'd done so completely by accident.

It happened after she lost her notebook, which she hadn't even known about at first. She'd eaten half of an apple during lunch, which she'd then catalogued during her following class, and that was the only time she'd used it. It made her paranoid and distressed and left her lost once she got home and searched frantically through her bag, only to find it missing. It was the worst she'd felt in a long, long time to lose the one thing she decided to place all of her trust into.

It was like losing her sense of control.

But that didn't last long, because she quickly ripped out a page from one of her math notebooks and started using that for the rest of the day, resolving to transfer the information over once she was able to find it the next day. She calmed herself down on that front.

The worst part was the fact that it was _Qrow's_ class that she had after lunch.

He'd asked her to talk after school the day after, which in itself was already odd.

He tended to talk to her outside of a school environment when he wanted to have a one-on-one conversation. After all, he'd dropped in before to see her at home before even when it was just for the sake of talking about school-related issues. That went for Yang, too. So, hearing him call her name once she was about to walk through the doorway and ask to see her after classes were out was almost like a death sentence.

She felt as if she was walking to her execution when the door shut behind her.

"You really wanted to talk at school?" she asks him, trying to keep the conversation light-hearted.

Judging from his stern expression and the slow blink he gave her, it didn't seem like he was all too interested in entertaining her small distractions. Instead, he cut right to the chase and reached underneath his desk to open a drawer. The few seconds in the time he shuffled through the papers and folders were the longest and most torturous she'd ever felt in her life. She knew even before he pulled the black cover above behind the wooden surface what it was he had.

Her notebook.

He held it up in his hand and looked her in the eye, a strange mix of worry and what almost looked like disappointment or straight up exhaustion evident in his gaze. "Well, I actually called you in so we could talk about this."

An oppressive wave of shock ran through her and it wasn't just the hunger that made her light-headed as she sucked in a sharp breath. "That's - "

"Don't'cha think you're a little young to be on a diet?"

She avoided eye contact at the same time as she avoided the question. "Where did you find it?"

Leaning himself back in his chair, Qrow shook his head and squinted his eyes, raising his hands in a questioning gesture. "What? You left it on your desk, so I picked it up," he explained, laying it on the table. "I'd say sorry for looking in it, but you left it open, so…"

Those words hit her like spears through her chest. How could she have been so reckless? Anyone could've found it. People worse than her uncle could've stumbled across it before him. Leaving it out in the open wasn't like her, but looking back, she didn't make note of anything about how the day in class itself went, no matter how hard she tried to recount it. Her memory was failing her a lot as of late. Pain in her stomach and her joints made her loopy and overwhelmed at every second of every day. She couldn't remember thinking of anything other than her food intake and she still left the one thing that was helping her with keeping that in check behind.

She was so overcome with remorse over this realization that she didn't even pay attention to what he started saying. He went on and on about how he wasn't sure about what she was going through and how he should've been paying more attention and how he wanted her to be able to come to him if she was having a hard time, but it ran right through her.

"Is it your classes? Is the stress getting to you?"

That wasn't it.

"What about your father? How's Taiyang been?"

Her father was fine. Her father was great. None of what she was going through had anything to do with him.

"I don't know what's going on, but you've got to talk to me, okay?"

 _He doesn't understand what you need,_ was what the voice in her head whispered. _Of course he's going to say this. He doesn't understand._

She stood there in silence as he bombarded her with question after question, not letting up despite her lack of interest in having a conversation with him. Her shoulders were tense and rigid, her body colder than normal, as if she'd been a corpse strung upright. His expression got more desperate. His voice got lower and more vulnerable while also becoming more stern at the same time, as if he couldn't quite decide on how gentle to be with her when it came to a situation he didn't fully understand. Qrow gave a deep sigh and stared her down as he finally came to a pause in his interrogation.

Then, he narrowed his eyes and leaned forward. "Kid, you listening?" he asked. He chooses to say one of the only things that could possibly have received a response from Ruby. "Look, your mother wouldn't have wanted - "

"My mom is dead," she said, cutting him off.

The empty classroom fell into tense silence.

"...Yeah, alright. That was probably a stupid thing to say," he admitted after a few seconds. "Please, just promise that if something was wrong, you'd tell me."

Letting out an inaudible hiss through her teeth, Ruby relaxed herself by the smallest margin. Maybe he wanted that to be an indication that she should trust him and go to him, but it only made her feel she finally had an out from one of the worst confrontations she'd ever had. She thought it to be the perfect opportunity to leave as quickly as possible.

So, she lied and said, "I promise, Uncle Qrow."

She turned her back on his lecture after picking up her notebook and silently seethed.

* * *

Her joints and bones felt like they creaked every time she crawled into bed.

Falling back into routine after her little hiccup was easy. Everything became so _easy_.

She didn't need to try anymore to convince herself not to eat. Her mind didn't want to eat anymore, even if her body did, and that was enough. She could feel her bones poking from her wrists and ribs and neck and it just didn't register in her mind that she was getting thinner and thinner and thinner. Nothing made a difference that she could see without it being warped and wrong and damaged.

No matter what, she still looked like her mother.

Should Ruby have dyed her hair? She'd have to have come up with a good excuse, or else she knew she'd have fallen apart and told the real reason why. And it wasn't just her hair color. Changing that wouldn't have changed what actually bothered her. Her face structure and her eyes - things she couldn't help or alter without going too far out of her way - we're exactly the same as her mother. No amount of starving seemed to be able to change that.

Even knowing that didn't make her stop.

She _needed_ this. The voice within her was making her dependent on this cycle because it was her friend. Possibly her only friend, at the time.

All she could think about for the coming months was how cold and depressed and weak she felt.

* * *

She modeled Crescent Rose after her uncle's weapon.

It wasn't long into her time at Signal that everyone started to design and forge their own weapons. In fact, Ruby was one of the first to submit her detailed blueprints.

Weapons always fascinated her.

Aside from her eating habits, she was glad to have that interest to focus on. She was either counting her calorie intake and feeling the consequences of having a barely functioning system or observing the fights and blades and guns of her classmates. It was nice to have something to get excited about for once in...quite some time. It'd been as long as she could remember since the last time anything actually made her happy. Tools made for the purpose of hurting and killing being beautiful and complex was a concept that fascinated her. It was art, in a sense. She latched onto this and it wasn't long before she could hold Crescent Rose in her own two hands.

It was just as gorgeous as she'd wanted it to be.

But, on top of that, it was...heavy.

 _Too_ heavy. It was everything she ever wanted, but she could barely hold it in her arms without feeling the full aching force. The recoil was even worse to deal with. It left bruises every time she tried to get used to it and it put her near the very bottom of her class when it came to field testing for the beginning of her second semester. There was no real way to build muscle with the state that she'd created of her body and she chose to continue the cycle even as she moved on to a second notebook and started to garner unwanted attention from her sister at school for not eating as much.

She tried to explain to Yang that she just didn't like the lunches they gave out, but it was harder to come up with an excuse for why she didn't choose to bring her own. It was at this point that Yang became suspicious of her actions, which finally made hiding them a real task.

It all made her frustrated and only fueled her latent self-hatred and insecurities. Nothing about her was ever good enough.

One day, she convinced Qrow to play video games with her as he stopped by to have a talk with Taiyang.

He reluctantly agreed to a couple of rounds, but ended up staying for five before saying he had to call it a night. Since he'd always made it a point to never go easy on her, she was surprised that she ended up winning two of the five, and she moved to shut the screen off as he packed up his things in the silence of her bedroom. She stared into the black box and listened to the shuffling behind her, feeling anxiety creep up into her chest.

Before he opened the door, she stopped him with a question that'd been on her mind for as long as she could remember. "Why did you become a Hunter?"

He halted in his tracks and the room went silent.

Ruby turned around to find his back facing her just as he decided to answer her question. "Thought I could change the world."

That didn't sound like him, but the honesty in his eyes when he moved to face her said it was true.

"Did you?"

"Sure," he shrugged, not sounding quite so certain. "I mean, scale when it comes to somethin' like that is hard to work with, but being a Hunter's about changing and saving lives. Hero stuff. All that."

Hero stuff. That'd always appealed to Ruby, but she never knew that the same went for Qrow. His personality seemed more self-serving than anything else, even though that didn't match up with his actions. He seemed to want to help people despite having something in his life that was obviously preventing that. The only problem lied in the fact that Ruby didn't _understand_ just what was holding him back. It couldn't have been the same thing she'd been dealing with, but she wondered if it was something similar.

She shook her head and shot him a questioning look. "But, why?" she asked, sounding distraught. "What do you get out of it?"

"Huh?" he considered the question for a moment, as if it was one he'd never given much thought, and sat down on the floor to bring himself to her eye level. Then, he slowly explained. "You look at a kid you've helped and think, _I did that_. It feels good to make a difference."

It was so simple, but it made sense.

Ruby could relate to that simplicity.

Making a difference - affecting the world - saving others - it was all a matter of having some sense of control. Being able to fight and defend herself as well as those around her _was_ control. It was exactly what she'd been so envious of every time she watched her sister fight, though she'd never put two and two together until that exact moment. That power and strength was what she'd been missing. Power and strength were control. They were at the very least gateways to it, and that was more than enough for her to latch onto the idea.

She thought to herself that if she could get that kind of control...

"...Do you think I could make a difference if I become a Huntress?"

The conflict in his eyes gave her pause.

She'd caught him off-guard with the question, that was for sure. He looked as if he wasn't sure at all how much damage he could've done by giving her one answer over another. A moment passed as he ran it through his mind, averting his eyes and rubbing at the back of his head. Finally, he decided to come to a conclusion that she hadn't at all expected or wanted to hear. "Well, you can't be a Huntress with the shape you're in."

What followed was a sharp intake of breath.

It was the first time he'd openly acknowledged her state since the one time he'd called her in after class. Since then, he'd left her to her own devices, though he appeared often and openly disappointed whenever he noticed her writing in the book or avoiding a meal. He resolved to be a passive observer, which she found fine and manageable, because it meant he wasn't getting in the way of what she wanted.

Right then, though, that seemed to change. Sputtering in offended desperation, she tried to object to the observation. "But, I - "

"I'd gladly teach you if you wanna get on changing that, though," he quickly cut her off with a knowing look.

With that, he stood, leaving her on the floor in an emotionally confused shock.

Even after he waved to her and shut the door behind him, and as she heard his voice from down the hall exchange goodbyes with her father, she stayed motionless with her legs crossed. His words raced through her head and she played out her options, experiencing a breakthrough. She needed that sort of motivation. She needed the drive to make a difference.

The idea was set in her mind from then on.

She would change. She _had_ to change.

Becoming a Huntress would give her control in her life and she couldn't get that unless she gave up the one form of control she had right then. It was the price she had to pay.

* * *

It was less than a week into her new lifestyle - feeding herself again, giving up on the charts and pages and numbers she'd been so dependent on up until then - that Ruby started to experience the very nightmare she was fearing.

The weight came back more quickly than she'd even thought possible. She pinched at the skin on her hip while scrutinizing herself in the mirror.

She found that she had to shove down food even when her brain was saying she didn't want it, because she needed to tell the difference between when she actually wasn't hungry and when she was _telling herself_ that she wasn't hungry. Building up a trust between her and her body wasn't easy when she'd worked so hard for so long at breaking it.

 _It's natural_ , she had to repeat in her mind. _It'll pass._

Ruby kept telling herself that once her body got used to it, she'd feel better. She'd _be_ better. She'd be able to train with her uncle and work at becoming a Huntress.

* * *

Changing her lifestyle had a quickly recognizable effect on her relationships, which was just about the last thing she'd expected.

It wasn't easy.

It was the furthest thing away from easy.

There was no direct communication about how she'd been breaking her old habits and getting better between her and her uncle. She didn't seek out his help, resolving to deal with it on her own. There'd only been a moment in which she asked if he would teach her a few things about scythe wielding after school one day and he'd paused, then gave one of the most genuine smiles she'd ever before seen on him and nodded.

It got easier to hold Crescent Rose. Her energy was returning to her and the things she wasn't at all able to handle quickly became part of her daily routine.

There were, of course, moments in which the voice in her head would try to pull her back in.

The thoughts that she was eating too much and that it would've been so easy to pick up the notebooks she'd thrown under her bed to remind her of how _in control_ she was and how she'd given that up had come back to haunt her. She'd created the voice and there it was, trying to trap her all over again within the walls she'd made for herself and subsequently torn down. It got fainter when she put her all into training and ended up sweaty and sore in a way that for once made her feel _good_ , so she worked herself ragged whenever the opportunity arose.

It gave her time to focus back on her studies. Field exams were becoming her favorite, even though she'd never quite gotten the hang of how to prepare for tests. She wasn't at the top of her class, but she was steadily improving as time went on to the point where becoming such was a real possibility.

Even her father had noticed. "I'm glad you've been training with Qrow," he said to her over dinner one day. "You look happier now than I've seen you in a long time."

It occurred to her that she really was happier.

Of course, Qrow and the after school lessons he'd been giving her were part of that, but it was mostly due to how she'd been working to climb out of the hole she dug for herself and was ultimately succeeding. Then again, having that support was nice, even if it wasn't overt or obvious.

It was the first time she didn't feel so alone.

* * *

Looking at herself now is different.

It's hard to think back on the toxicity she'd once lived and imagine that she used to _be_ that person. The voice she'd heard when she was young doesn't exist in the now seventeen-year-old Ruby. She's not necessarily an adult, but she feels like her experiences have pushed her pretty quickly down that route, and she's certainly not the same person that she used to be. Her self-confidence is at an all-time high because she has no reason to think otherwise.

Maybe, looking back on it, the way she was able to overcome the awful image of herself she'd had ingrained in her mind was too simple.

But, when she looks at her reflection, she doesn't see the cage she once was so familiar with.

Her mind's found another fixation. Attending Beacon and getting closer with her sister helped her to leave the old life she'd built behind in the dust and it was the best decision she made. Her mind is clear instead of hazy and bogged down by perpetual fatigue. Her reflexes are quick as ever instead of strained and sluggish. Her perception isn't shifted the same way it'd once been. The days pass normally instead of in an unidentifiable blur.

The girl in the mirror looks good. Ruby _feels_ good. She's found a replacement for her addiction and it's working.

It's not perfect, but it's working.

Her smile is real again.

She fights and fights and fights for a cause and she doesn't need to think. It's second nature to her.

For one quick moment, she reflects on her mother's untimely death and how being a Huntress did that to her.

Ruby smiles. No matter the risks, she needs to be a Huntress. Dying on the job might be worth it.

It's through this that she finds herself able to finally forgive her mother. And, in the end, forgive herself.


End file.
